About this topic
Summary Representationalism about consciousness is (roughly) the view that phenomenal consciousness is a species of mental representation.  Reductive representationalism identifies consciousness with a kind of representational state specified in a functional/physical vocabulary.  Non-reductive representationalism simply states that consciousness is representation of a special kind, perhaps of a conscious kind.  Representation is often glossed in terms of "aboutness" or "accuracy conditions". Representationalist views can also be more or less pure. The purest form of representationalism holds that phenomenal character is identical to or supervenes on representational content. Less pure forms of representationalism hold that phenomenal character supervenes on representational content and other factors, for example, sensory modalities, or, more generally, "manners of representation".  
Key works Precursors to representationalism include the intentionalist accounts of perception in Bergmann 1959Anscombe 1965Hintikka 1969, and Harman 1990, as well as the view of perception as belief defended in Armstrong 1968 and Pitcher 1971.  The key modern works include Dretske 1995Lycan 1996, and Tye 1995 for reductive representationalism. Byrne 2001, Chalmers 2004, and Crane 2003 are important defences of non-reductive representationalism. Block 1996 and follow-up papers have been influential as a criticism of the view. 
Introductions Bourget & Mendelovici 2014, Lycan 2000, and Seager & Bourget 2007 are broad introductions to representationalism covering many key issues. Chalmers 2004 also makes for a good introduction. 
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465 found
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  1. What Constitutes Phenomenal Character?Murat Aydede - manuscript
    [Working Draft — Comments are welcome! — March 2024] Reductive strong representationalists accept the Common Kind Thesis about subjectively indistinguishable sensory hallucinations, illusions, and veridical experiences. I show that this doesn’t jibe well with their declared phenomenal externalism and argue that there is no sense in which the phenomenal character of sensory experiences is constituted by the sensible properties represented by these experiences, as representationalists claim. First, I argue that, given general representationalist principles, no instances of a sensible property constitute (...)
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  2. On Gilbert Harman's The Intrisic Quality of Experience.Tim Klaassen - manuscript
    I propose that there are two kind's of qualia realism, and that Harman's observations about the transparency of experience pose a threat to only one of these.
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  3. Precis of Color, Content, and Consciousness.Michael Tye - manuscript
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  4. Block and the representation theory of sensory qualities.William G. Lycan - unknown - In Adam Pautz & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness. MIT Press.
    In the nearly half a century since its modern inception (Anscombe (1965), Hintikka (1969)), the Representation theory has faced no more implacable enemy than Ned Block. He has offered objection after objection, usually in the form of apparent counterexamples, and as I write this he shows no sign of flagging.
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  5. Dretske on naturalizing the mind.David J. Cole - manuscript
    Dretske’s Naturalizing the Mind sets out the case for holding that mental states in general are natural representers of reality. Mental states have functions; for many states the function is to indicate what is going on in the world. Among such indicator states are beliefs. The content of these states is given by what they are supposed to represent. So if a state is supposed to indicate that it’s dark, then “it’s dark” is the content of the state. Thus we (...)
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  6. Tye, tree-rings, and representation.Wayne Wright - manuscript
    In a recent book, [1] Michael Tye has offered a representational theory of phenomenal consciousness. As Tye himself admits, part of his account involves arguing for a position which has traditionally received little support; he contends that _all_ experiences and feelings have representational.
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  7. The Possible Worlds Theory of Visual Experience.Edward Averill & Joseph Gottlieb - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    When we watch movies, or are tricked by a trompe-l’oeil painting, we seem to be visually representing possible worlds; often non-actual possible worlds. This suggests that we really can visually represent possible worlds. The suggested claim is refined and developed here into a theory of visual experience that holds that all visual experiences, both veridical and non-veridical, represent possible worlds, many of which are non-actual.
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  8. Is Pain Representational?Murat Aydede - forthcoming - Belgrade Philosophical Annual.
    [Special issue honoring Nikola Grahek] Representationalism in philosophy of perception has become more or less the dominant view. There are various versions of it not all of which are motivated by the same set of concerns. Different metaphysical and epistemological agendas are at work in different strands of the movement. In this paper, I will focus on what has come to be known as strong representationalism. This view has reductive and non-reductive versions, which are usually paired with realist and irrealist (...)
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  9. Acquaintance and the Qualitative Character of Conscious Intentional States.Anna Giustina - forthcoming - Argumenta.
    Conscious intentional states are mental states that represent things as being a certain way and do so consciously: they involve a phenomenally conscious representation. For any phenomenally conscious state, there is something it is like for its subject to be in it. The way it is like for a subject to be in a certain phenomenal state is the state’s phenomenal character. According to some authors, phenomenal character has two components: qualitative character (i.e., the “what it is like” component) and (...)
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  10. Inner Acquaintance Theories of Consciousness.Anna Giustina - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind 4.
    Most recent philosophical theories of consciousness account for it in terms of representation, the bulk of the debate revolving around whether (suitably) representing something is sufficient for consciousness (as per first-order representationalism) or some further (meta-)representation is needed (as per higher-order representationalism and self-representationalism). In this paper, I explore an alternative theory of consciousness, one that aims to explain consciousness not in terms of representation but in terms of the epistemically and metaphysically direct relation of acquaintance. I call this the (...)
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  11. Moods and the Salience of Subjectivity.Anna Giustina - forthcoming - In Self and Affect. Palgrave Macmillan.
    The philosophical debate around the nature of moods has mostly focused on their apparent undirectedness: unlike mental states such as perceptual experiences, thoughts, and emotions, moods do not seem to be directed at any specific object, and indeed they do not seem to be directed at anything at all. In this paper, I want to draw attention to a different feature of moods, one that is as important and in need of explanation as their apparent undirectedness, but which has been (...)
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  12. Transparency and the Mindfulness Opacity Hypothesis.Victor Lange & Thor Grünbaum - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Many philosophers endorse the Transparency Thesis, the claim that by introspection one cannot become aware of one's experience. Recently, some authors have suggested that the Transparency Thesis is challenged by introspective states reached under mindfulness. We label this the Mindfulness Opacity Hypothesis. The present paper develops the hypothesis in important new ways. First, we motivate the hypothesis by drawing on recent clinical psychology and cognitive science of mindfulness. Secondly, we develop the hypothesis by describing the implied shift in experiential perspective, (...)
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  13. The informational profile of valence: The metasemantic argument for imperativism.Manolo Martínez & Luca Barlassina - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Some mental states have valence—they are pleasant or unpleasant. According to imperativism, valence depends on imperative content, while evaluativism tells us that it depends on evaluative content. We argue that if one considers valence’s informational profile, it becomes evident that imperativism is superior to evaluativism. More precisely, we show that if one applies the best available metasemantics to the role played by (un)pleasant mental states in our cognitive economy, then these states turn out to have imperative rather than evaluative content, (...)
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  14. Beliefs as Self-Verifying Fictions.Angela Mendelovici - forthcoming - In Eric Schwitzgebel & Jonathan Jong (eds.), What Is Belief? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Abstract In slogan form, the thesis of this paper is that beliefs are self-verifying fictions: We make them up, but in so doing, they come to exist, and so the fiction of belief is in fact true. This picture of belief emerges from a combination of three independently motivated views: (1) a phenomenal intentionalist picture of intentionality, on which phenomenal consciousness is the basis of intentionality; (2) what I will call a “self-ascriptivist” picture of derived representation, on which non-fundamental representational (...)
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  15. Three Perspectives on Perspective.Angela Mendelovici - forthcoming - In Green Mitchell & Michel Jan (eds.), William Lycan on Mind, Meaning, and Method. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
    William Lycan is a notable early proponent of representationalism, which is, roughly, the view that a mental state's phenomenal features are nothing over and above its representational features (perhaps in addition to some further ingredients). Representationalism faces a challenge in accounting for perspectival experiences, which are, roughly, experiences that arise from our occupying a particular real or perceived perspective on the world. This paper presents representationalism, situating Lycan's version of representationalism within the representationalist landscape, and describes the challenge from perspectival (...)
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  16. Deceptive Worlds, Skepticism, and Axiarchism.John Pittard - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-36.
    Axiarchism holds that fundamental concrete reality is necessarily ordered toward goodness. I argue that it is not fully rational to reject axiarchism while also rejecting radical skepticism. A key premise in the argument is that among conceivable worlds that contain one’s internal duplicate, ‘epistemically inhospitable’ worlds (i.e. worlds where all or most of one’s internal duplicates are radically deceived) are predominant. This predominance of inhospitable worlds provides a prima facie reason for thinking that the actual world is probably inhospitable. To (...)
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  17. The Unity of Perceptual Content.Indrek Reiland - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Naïve Realists hold that perceptual experience is a conscious relation to an object and its property-instances. In contrast, Representationalists hold that it is a conscious representational state with content, something which is accurate or inaccurate in certain conditions. The most common versions of Representationalism take perceptual content to be either general (Generalism) or singular in the object-place and otherwise consisting of attribution of properties (Singularism/Attributionism). Susanna Schellenberg has recently developed a version on which perceptual content is singular even in the (...)
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  18. The Sufficiency of Objective Representation.Robert D. Rupert - forthcoming - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind. Routledge.
  19. Sankarāchārya and Kantian notion of consciousness.Manas Kumar Sahu - forthcoming - Advaitya Utsav Conference.
    In this paper, my objective is to show how Sankarāchārya's concept of reality is deferent from the Kantian notion of reality, despite many similarities between them. Cartesian skepticism of universal doubt is a challenge for the Kantian notion of reality; however, it can't be applied to Sankarāchārya's concept of reality because of the acceptance of different paradigm to explain the reality and Sankarāchārya's non-representationalistic approach towards the reality. The attack on representationalism can't be applicable to Sankarāchārya's philosophy.
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  20. Debates Contemporâneos em Filosofia da Memória: Uma Breve Introdução.César Schirmer dos Santos, André Sant'Anna, Kourken Michaelian, James Openshaw & Denis Perrin - forthcoming - Lampião.
    Neste artigo apresentamos, de forma concisa e em português, alguns elementos-chave dos principais debates contemporâneos na filosofia da memória. Nosso principal objetivo é tornar essas discussões mais acessíveis aos leitores de língua portuguesa, fornecendo uma atualização importante para esforços anteriores (Sant’Anna & Michaelian, 2019a). Começamos introduzindo a noção de viagem no tempo mental, a qual estabelece a base empírica para a metodologia empregada em trabalhos recentes, antes de apresentar dois debates centrais. Primeiro, o debate entre causalistas e simulacionistas sobre a (...)
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  21. Many-to-One Intentionalism.Manolo Martínez & Bence Nanay - 2024 - Journal of Philosophy 121 (2):89-107.
    Intentionalism is the view that perceptual phenomenology depends on perceptual content. The aim of this paper is to make explicit an ambiguity in usual formulations of intentionalism, and to argue in favor of one way to disambiguate it. It concerns whether perceptual phenomenology depends on the content of one and only one representation (often construed as being identical to a certain perceptual experience), or instead depends on a collection of many different representations throughout the perceptual system. We argue in favor (...)
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  22. Deflating the hard problem of consciousness by multiplying explanatory gaps.Işık Sarıhan - 2024 - Ratio 37 (1):1-13.
    Recent philosophy has seen a resurgence of the realist view of sensible qualities such as colour. The view holds that experienced qualities are properties of the objects in the physical environment, not mentally instantiated properties like qualia or merely intentional, illusory ones. Some suggest that this move rids us of the explanatory gap between physical properties and the qualitative features of consciousness. Others say it just relocates the problem of qualities to physical objects in the environment, given that such qualities (...)
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  23. Seeing through Transparency.Davide Bordini - 2023 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Volume 3. Oxford University Press.
    Since the 1990s the so-called transparency of experience has played a crucial role in core debates in philosophy of mind. However, recent developments in the literature have made transparency itself quite opaque. The very idea of transparent experience has become quite fuzzy, due to the articulation of many different notions of transparency and transparency theses. Absent a unified logical space where these notions and theses can be mapped and confronted, we are left with an overall impression of conceptual chaos. This (...)
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  24. Consciousness, Attention, and the Motivation-Affect System.Tom Cochrane - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (7):139-163.
    It is an important feature of creatures like us that our various motivations compete for control over our behaviour, including mental behaviour such as imagining and attending. In large part, this competition is adjudicated by the stimulation of affect — the intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant aspects of experience. In this paper I argue that the motivation-affect system controls a sub-type of attention called 'alerting attention' to bring various goals and stimuli to consciousness and thereby prioritize those contents for action. This (...)
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  25. Self-Experience Despite Self-Elusiveness.Joseph Gottlieb - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (4):1491-1504.
    The thesis of self-elusiveness says, roughly, that the self fails to be phenomenally manifest from the first-person perspective. This thesis has a long history. Yet many who endorse it do so only in a very specific sense. They say that the self fails to be phenomenally manifest as an object from the first-person perspective; they say that self-experience is not a species of ‘object-consciousness’. Yet if consciousness outstrips object-consciousness, then we are left with the possibility that there is another sense (...)
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  26. In Defense of Cognitive Phenomenology: Meeting the Matching Content Challenge.Preston Lennon - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (6):2391-2407.
    Bayne and McClelland (2016) raise the matching content challenge for proponents of cognitive phenomenology: if the phenomenal character of thought is determined by its intentional content, why is it that my conscious thought that there is a blue wall before me and my visual perception of a blue wall before me don’t share any phenomenology, despite their matching content? In this paper, I first show that the matching content challenge is not limited to proponents of cognitive phenomenology but extends to (...)
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  27. Attenuated Representationalism. [REVIEW]Angela Mendelovici - 2023 - Analysis 83 (2):373–393.
    In The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience, David Papineau offers some metaphysical reasons for rejecting representationalism. This paper overviews these reasons, arguing that while some of his arguments against some versions of representationalism succeed, there are versions of phenomenal intentionalism that escape his criticisms. Still, once we consider some of the contents of perceptual experiences, such as their perspectival contents, it is clear that perceptual experience does not present us with the world as we take it to be. This leads to (...)
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  28. Truth and Content in Sensory Experience.Angela Mendelovici - 2023 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Volume 3. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 318–338.
    David Papineau’s _The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience_ is deep, insightful, refreshingly brisk, and very readable. In it, Papineau argues that sensory experiences are intrinsic and non-relational states of subjects; that they do not essentially involve relations to worldly facts, properties, or other items (though they do happen to correlate with worldly items); and that they do not have truth conditions simply in virtue of their conscious (i.e., phenomenal) features. I am in enthusiastic agreement with the picture as described so far. (...)
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  29. Review of Tye's Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness. [REVIEW]Angela Mendelovici & David Bourget - 2023 - Philosophical Review 132 (2):338-343.
  30. Mental Strength: A Theory of Experience Intensity.Jorge Morales - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):1-21.
    Our pains can be more or less intense, our mental imagery can be more or less vivid, our perceptual experiences can be more or less striking. These degrees of intensity of conscious experiences are all manifestations of a phenomenal property I call mental strength. In this article, I argue that mental strength is a domain-general phenomenal magnitude; in other words, it is a phenomenal quantity shared by all conscious experiences that explains their degree of felt intensity. Mental strength has been (...)
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  31. La représentation et le sens des réalités.Pierre Steiner - 2023 - Klesis 56.
    Claudine Tiercelin has shared with Hilary Putnam a criticism of various attempts to naturalize intentionality and a criticism of radical forms of anti-representationalism. Nevertheless, this agreement is accompanied by an important divergence concerning the value of the couple “representation/reality” for defining mind and knowledge after one has rejected reductive naturalism and anti-representationalism. In order to analyse this divergence, I resort to Peirce and to Aristotle.
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  32. Becoming 'Realistic' about Reality.Ilexa Yardley - 2023 - Https://Medium.Com/the-Circular-Theory/.
    Conservation of the Circle is the only dynamic in Nature. Forget about physics, philosophy, psychology, technology, biology, finance, politics, and the media (the concrete abstraction) (the constant variable). Language cannot provide anywhere near a 'complete' articulation (understanding) of (what humans experience as) 'Reality.'.
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  33. Complementary Opposition.Ilexa Yardley - 2023 - Https://Medium.Com/the-Circular-Theory/.
    Complementarity (complementary identity). Where it comes from. Why (and how) it works.
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  34. Rosenthal's Representationalism.Jacob Berger & Richard Brown - 2022 - In Josh Weisberg (ed.), Qualitative Consciousness: Themes from the Philosophy of David Rosenthal. Cambridge.
    David Rosenthal explains conscious mentality in terms of two independent, though complementary, theories—the higher-order thought (“HOT”) theory of consciousness and quality-space theory (“QST”) about mental qualities. It is natural to understand this combination of views as constituting a kind of representationalism about experience—that is, a version of the view that an experience’s conscious character is identical with certain of its representational properties. At times, however, Rosenthal seems to resist this characterization of his view. We explore here whether and to what (...)
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  35. Representaciones como sistemas (2nd edition).Esteban Céspedes & Cecilia Valdivia - 2022 - Artefactos 11 (1).
    One of the problems that are often indicated as a criticism of different forms of representationalism is the difficulty to find definitions that are neither semantic nor realist in a simple sense. The present work tackles this class of critiques from a contextualist point of view, assuming those semantic aspects that are necessary for a concept of representation, but showing that semantic relations of representation should neither be static, nor referential in a classical and strictly realist sense. Two distinctions are (...)
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  36. The Significance of the Many Property Problem.Tim Crane & Alex Grzankowski - 2022 - Phenomenology and Mind 22 (22):170.
    One of the most influential traditional objections to Adverbialism about perceptual experience is that posed by Frank Jackson’s ‘many property problem’. Perhaps largely because of this objection, few philosophers now defend Adverbialism. We argue, however, that the essence of the many property problem arises for all of the leading metaphysical theories of experience: all leading theories must simply take for granted certain facts about experience, and no theory looks well positioned to explain the facts in a straightforward way. Because of (...)
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  37. Internal constraints for phenomenal externalists: a structure matching theory.Bryce Dalbey & Bradford Saad - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-29.
    We motivate five constraints on theorizing about sensory experience. We then propose a novel form of naturalistic intentionalism that succeeds where other theories fail by satisfying all of these constraints. On the proposed theory, which we call structure matching tracking intentionalism, brains states track determinables. Internal structural features of those states select determinates of those determinables for presentation in experience. We argue that this theory is distinctively well-positioned to both explain internal-phenomenal structural correlations and accord external features a role in (...)
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  38. The Higher-Order Map Theory of Consciousness.Joseph Gottlieb - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (1):131-148.
    ABSTRACT I begin by developing a challenge for the Higher-Order Thought variant of Higher-Order representational theories of consciousness. The challenge is to account for the distinctive phenomenal character of visual experience—its presentational character. After setting out the challenge, I articulate a novel form of Higher-Order theory that can account for presentational character—the Map Theory of consciousness. The theory’s distinctive claim is that the relevant higher-order representations have a cartographic format.
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  39. Representationalism, Scepticism and Phenomenal Realism.Manas Kumar Sahu - 2022 - Prometeica - Revista De Filosofía Y Ciencias 25:51-65.
    The irreducibility thesis of phenomenal consciousness can only succeed against the sceptical attack and avoid solipsism iff it can coherently establish the transition from subjective certainty to the objectivity of knowledge. The sceptical attack on the relationship between the phenomenal qualitative character of experience about the subjects own mental fact and the awareness of the qualitative properties of the phenomenal object can be avoided through establishing the immediacy of experience. The phenomenal realist become successful in establishing the subjective certainty about (...)
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  40. Quantitative Character and the Composite Account of Phenomenal Content.Kim Soland - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
    I advance an account of quantitative character, a species of phenomenal character that presents as an intensity (cf. a quality) and includes experience dimensions such as loudness, pain intensity, and visual pop-out. I employ psychological and neuroscientific evidence to demonstrate that quantitative characters are best explained by attentional processing, and hence that they do not represent external qualities. Nonetheless, the proposed account of quantitative character is conceived as a compliment to the reductive intentionalist strategy toward qualitative states; I argue that (...)
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  41. Colour hallucination: In defence of externalist representationalism.Elisabeth Lucia Waczek & Wolfgang Barz - 2022 - Analysis 82 (1):3-7.
    In a recent paper, Gow raised a new and interesting problem for externalist representationalism, the conclusion of which is that its proponents are unable to provide an acceptable account of the phenomenal character of colour hallucination. In contrast to Gow, we do not believe that the problem is particularly severe – indeed, that there is any problem at all. Thus our aim is to defend externalist representationalism against the problem raised by Gow. To this end, we will first reconstruct her (...)
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  42. Is Representationalism Committed to Colour Physicalism?Daniel Mario Weger - 2022 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 22 (64):1-20.
    The circularity problem states that the representationalist about phenomenal consciousness gives a circular explanation if she adopts the classic view about secondary qualities, such as colours, that characterises them as dispositions to produce experiences with a specifi c phenomenal character. Since colour primitivism faces severe diffi culties, it seems that colour physicalism is the only viable option for the representationalist. I will argue that the representationalist is not committed to colour physicalism because she can adopt an anti-realist theory of colour. (...)
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  43. Valence: A reflection.Luca Barlassina - 2021 - Emotion Researcher: ISRE's Sourcebook for Research on Emotion and Affect (C. Todd and E. Wall Eds.).
    This article gives a short presentation of reflexive imperativism, the intentionalist theory of valence I developed with Max Khan Hayward. The theory says that mental states have valence in virtue of having reflexive imperative content. More precisely, mental states have positive valence (i.e., feel good) in virtue of issuing the command "More of me!", and they have negative valence (i.e., feel bad) in virtue of issuing the command "Less of me!" The article summarises the main arguments in favour of reflexive (...)
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  44. How Judgments of Visual Resemblance are Induced by Visual Experience.Alon Chasid & Alik Pelman - 2021 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (11-12):54-76.
    Judgments of visual resemblance (‘A looks like B’), unlike other judgments of resemblance, are often induced directly by visual experience. What is the nature of this experience? We argue that the visual experience that prompts a subject looking at A to judge that A looks like B is a visual experience of B. After elucidating this thesis, we defend it, using the ‘phenomenal contrast’ method. Comparing our account to competing accounts, we show that the phenomenal contrast between a visual experience (...)
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  45. Illusions of Affection: A Hyper-Illusory Account of Normative Valence.Mihailis Diamantis - 2021 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (5-6):6-29.
    This article challenges the orthodox position that some smells are pleasantly fragrant and some tactile sensations are painful. It proposes that the affective components of our experiences are a kind of illusion. Under this alternative picture, experiences that seem to have positive or negative affect never actually do. Rather, the affective component is hyper-illusory, a second-order misrepresentation of the way things actually seem to us. While perceptual hyperillusions have elicited scepticism in other contexts, affective hyperillusions can withstand common critiques. Focusing (...)
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  46. Strong Representationalism and Bodily Sensations: Reliable Causal Covariance and Biological Function.Coninx Sabrina - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (2):210-232.
    Bodily sensations, such as pain, hunger, itches, or sexual feelings, are commonly characterized in terms of their phenomenal character. In order to account for this phenomenal character, many philosophers adopt strong representationalism. According to this view, bodily sensations are essentially and entirely determined by an intentional content related to particular conditions of the body. For example, pain would be nothing more than the representation of actual or potential tissue damage. In order to motivate and justify their view, strong representationalists often (...)
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  47. A representationalist reading of Kantian intuitions.Ayoob Shahmoradi - 2021 - Synthese 198 (3):2169-2191.
    There are passages in Kant’s writings according to which empirical intuitions have to be (a) singular, (b) object-dependent, and (c) immediate. It has also been argued that empirical intuitions (d) are not truth-apt, and (e) need to provide the subject with a proof of the possibility of the cognized object. Having relied on one or another of the a-e constraints, the naïve realist readers of Kant have argued that it is not possible for empirical intuitions to be representations. Instead they (...)
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  48. Thinking through illusion.Dominic Alford-Duguid - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 28 (3):617-638.
    Perception of a property (e.g. a colour, a shape, a size) can enable thought about the property, while at the same time misleading the subject as to what the property is like. This long-overlooked claim parallels a more familiar observation concerning perception-based thought about objects, namely that perception can enable a subject to think about an object while at the same time misleading her as to what the object is like. I defend the overlooked claim, and then use it to (...)
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  49. Beyond good and bad: Reflexive imperativism, not evaluativism, explains valence.Luca Barlassina - 2020 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (4):274-284.
    Evaluativism (Carruthers 2018) and reflexive imperativism (Barlassina and Hayward 2019) agree that valence—the (un)pleasantness of experiences—is a natural kind shared across all affective states. But they disagree about what valence is. For evaluativism, an experience is pleasant/unpleasant in virtue of representing its worldly object as good/bad; for reflexive imperativism, an experience is pleasant/unpleasant in virtue of commanding its subject to get more/less of itself. I argue that reflexive imperativism is superior to evaluativism according to Carruthers’s own standards. He maintains that (...)
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  50. Reductive Model of the Conscious Mind.Wieslaw Galus & Janusz Starzyk (eds.) - 2020 - Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
    Research on natural and artificial brains is proceeding at a rapid pace. However, the understanding of the essence of consciousness has changed slightly over the millennia, and only the last decade has brought some progress to the area. Scientific ideas emerged that the soul could be a product of the material body and that calculating machines could imitate brain processes. However, the authors of this book reject the previously common dualism—the view that the material and spiritual-psychic processes are separate and (...)
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